Roots & Branches: DUI deaths spur granddaughter to fill in details

Abud, a copywriter who lives in Downingtown, Chester County, began searching her family tree with an ancestry.com subscription just eight months ago.

During those eight months, she traced her paternal lineage to an 18th-century immigrant named Johann George Klein and has found connections to other venerable Lebanon County surnames such as Light and Seibert.

But the forebears who have fueled her zeal for family history are much closer to the modern day: Her grandparents, Gerald and Linda Seibert Kline, who were killed by a drunken driver in 1965 in California, leaving Abud's father, Jerry, a 4-year-old orphan.

Abud began a blog about her efforts to find out more information about the grandparents she never knew.

"My dad doesn't know much about his family," Abud wrote. "He can't remember anything before the accident. I want to know who they were, how they fell in love, who their friends were.

"I want to know everything."

Over this relatively short period of time, she's researched at the Lebanon County Historical Society, tracked down information on her grandfather's Navy career and connected with her grandfather's elderly sister.

Along the way, she visited the house in Annville where Gerald had grown up and learned more about his personality.

But the most important part of Abud's research has been directed at finding out what happened to Thomas Kaylor, the drunken driver who caused the fatal crash.

Using various records found on ancestry.

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com, she found a marriage, divorce and death record for Kaylor, the latter dated 1969 - just four years after the Klines were killed.

Just last month, she found out that Kaylor had been convicted in the fatal crash, but when the documents about his case arrived recently, she was heartbroken to find that the sentence had been probation (unfortunately, not an uncommon occurrence in the time before DUI homicide cases were taken seriously).

He did serve a year in jail for violating his probation and died soon afterward.

Amid her serious research on the tragedy, Abud also found some comic relief in information about her great-grandmother, Fern Achenbach Seibert, who made the newspaper several times over the years - usually for either suffering minor injuries at her hospital jobs or being hit as a pedestrian.

Abud's search has had its share of false starts and dead ends.

"As I investigate, I can't help but feel like I'm watching an episode of 'LOST,'" she wrote. "With every question that I answer, I uncover another mystery."

I found that reading her blog from its beginning chronologically to be a fascinating experience. Abud's blog is titled "Finding Kline" and is found at the URL: http://findingkline.wordpress.com/about.

Beidler is a freelance writer and lecturer on genealogy whose column appears Mondays in the Lebanon Daily News. Contact him either at Box 270, Lebanon, PA 17042; or by e-mail at james@beidler.us.

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